Fitzgerald, Hemingway fascinate after all these years

It might be F. Scott Fitzgerald's most repeated line: “There are no second acts in American life.” Happily, he was wrong, at least when it came to his books. His books were obscure at the time of his death and perennially popular now.

“The Fitzgerald revival makes a remarkable chapter in the history of literary reputation,” writes Scott Donaldson.

He should know. Donaldson, who divides his time between San Diego and Scottsdale, has written prolifically on Fitzgerald for decades. The same goes for Hemingway. Between the two, he has written a trio of biographies, edited and contributed to three books of criticism and authored 42 articles.

He still has more he wants to say about them. Donaldson says as much in his introduction to a new book, “Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days” (Columbia University Press, $32.50). “But,” Donaldson adds, “in my eightieth year and with the encouragement of many colleagues, it is time to collect the best of what I've so far set down on paper about them.”

Other writers have engaged him. He's written biographies of the major American poets Edwin Arlington Robinson and Archibald MacLeish and of the estimable short story writer and novelist John Cheever, among others. But his touchstones remain Fitzgerald and Hemingway — and Donaldson will be talking about both and signing books in an appearance at Warwick's in La Jolla at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

His writing on both is highly accessible. He credits his decade as a newspaper writer and editor, which predated his academic career, as a factor in the clarity of his style.

Of Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's great novel “The Great Gatsby,” he makes this blunt assertion: “Nick is a snob. He dislikes people in general and denigrates them in particular. He dodges emotional commitments. Neither his ethical code or his behaviors is exemplary.”

And what do these shortcomings in Nick's character lead him to conclude? That “he is the perfect narrator for ‘The Great Gatsby.’ ” And he explains why.

“As wonderful as this book is,” Donaldson says in a telephone interview, “attention to it is out of proportion to his other work.” In a different way, he says, “Tender Is the Night” is just as important.

“It was Fitzgerald's attempt at an epic story,” he explains.

Turning to Hemingway, Donaldson feels that he never wrote a novel on a level with “Gatsby.” But he did write two luminous ones. In fact, “Two Great Novels” is the name of a section in his book devoted to “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms.”

There's one more reason he's remained inspired to write about Hemingway.

“He was the greatest American short story writer,” Donaldson declares.

The big American picture

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway get a good reception in a big new book that is tailor-made for fruitful and fun browsing: “A New Literary History of America” (Harvard University Press, $49.95). By the time you get to them, though, you are already five centuries into the history of America. The first entry, about the year 1507, traces the first appearance of the word America on a map.

This is a reference book for anyone with a curiosity about the sweep and scope of not just American literature but the culture itself in art, film, sermon and song. The breadth reflects the interests of its co-editors: Greil Marcus, known for books like “The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes,” which look at popular music in a broad context; and Werner Sollors, a professor of English and African-American Studies at Harvard who has edited an impressive range of anthologies.

Its essays, numbering in the hundreds, are cleanly written and the pairing of writer to subject is part of the interest. They appear chronologically, some with a specific date to mark their significance and others with a year only.

For 1926, there's Walter Mosley, creator of the excellent Los Angeles-based mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins, writing a pithy essay on the birth of hard-boiled prose, which he titles “Poisonville.” Savor this sentence: “Hardboiled is a state of being, not a state that any sane tourist would want to pass through on holiday.”

Marking 1968, you get Mary Gaitskill, a provocative novelist, writing on Norman Mailer, the earlier literary provocateur, and coming up with probing observations about his writings: “They are precious, annoying and narcissistic, and yet as such, they are artifacts from narcissism's golden age, when the revelations of the self, the man behind the curtain of Art, was a refreshing surprise rather than an especially dull convention.”

To paraphrase Whitman, who gets a big entry himself of course, the book contains multitudes: scores of poets, from Anne Bradstreet to Robert Frost to Rae Armantrout (who teaches at UCSD); fiction writers from the birth of republic to the present; a select number of visual artists that includes Thomas Cole of the Hudson River School to Maya Lin and her “Vietnam Veteran's Memorial”; and musicians like Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan.

Even the Winchester rifle and Mickey Mouse get entries. And entries like these make you realize that the editors have lost track of their mission along the way. They confuse literary history with cultural history of a broader kind. But there is so much good stuff in this book that you ultimately forgive “A New Literary History of America” its obvious faults — and just keep sifting through it.